My 'new' mac Book Pro is a mid 2015, blimey where did those 6 years go? I have used it as a desktop 'puter since I got it, 2 external monitors, proper keyboard and mouse and hundreds of external 4 and 5tb HDDs (OK, not hundreds, 8). The MBP is still going strong but I need a new M1 based machine obviously. Like the number of guitars I need, this concept can not be explained to Mrs D. The new M1 Mac Mini will become my media server, desktop 'puter and the old MBP will be used as a laptop, she has a Macbook Air laptop, so why can't I?
One of the things I love(d) about Apple 'puters is the ability to boot external disks, I have a couple of 32 bit Apple OSses for olden days stuff, my MBP is running through an external copy of Catalina on a SSD, El Capitan is on the internal HD. This probably wont be possible on the new M1 chips, yeah some nerds say they have done it but the new chip will only run Big Sur and the hoop jumping to boot a different OS on an external SSD will be many, an olden days spinny HDD will just laugh at you!
So, although this new chip is the bollocks of the dog, Apple have taken a backward step in forcing folks to use Thunderbolt SSDs to make bootable clones and only allow Big Sur to run on the M1. A bootable backup clone is even more important now because these modern macs have everything nailed onto the motherboard, if your disk fails (the most likely lump of tech for a catastrophe) then your machine is a paperweight. So a couple of 250gb Thunderbolt SSDs will be needed as well as a nice new mac Mini! Last century I used an old iMac for about 4 years when the main HD failed by booting it from an external clone.
I don't ever store any of my data on the disc that runs my operating system, so the smallest SDD will do me, Apple charges big wonga for disk and RAM upgrades so I'll just be getting the 16gb RAM upgrade and sticking to the 256gb disc. I always use external drives for all my data with a stupid amount of backups - my photos are on my main data HDD, backed up locally to 2 backup drives, backed up on Google Drive, Dropbox and SYNC.com! I need to review my backups strategy! BTW if you want a nice private backup service SYNC.com is based in Canada and you can store stuff you don't want the feds looking at because they have nice end to end encryption and they don't even know what you are backing up, I think 2tb costs me about €80 a year? I wouldn't keep 'private' stuff on iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox or any of the other big systems the feds can wander around at will.
